Driving Forces of Pixar's Cars 3

Interview by John Grafman

AutoDesignO is honored to be at Pixar in advance of the Cars 3 movie release for our off-the-beaten-path, exclusive conversation with Ray Evernham – stock car icon / consultant on the Cars 3 movie, and Jay Ward – Creative Director for the Cars franchise. We kick the tires and look under the hood of these two, where we find the heart and soul of the latest Pixar picture. Take a spin with us!

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AutoDesignO: Okay, we’re hoping you guys could maybe tell us a little bit more about what excites you in automotive design.

Ray Evernham: Oh wow, that is probably one of the better questions that we’ve been asked. I know it doesn’t pertain exactly to the movie, but with me I love the personal expression when people design, they don’t have to really design around the necessity. I love art-deco cars, I love to see a person’s, whether it’s personality or artistic eye in the role of a fender or the way a wheel well is cut, or a vent, or a side cove, anything like that. So with me, the use of shape of car whether it’s smooth or lines or cut, or the combination of things. I love that personalized artistic shape of a vehicle made out of metal, or fiberglass … Or carbon-fiber.

Jay Ward: Yeah, any one of those materials would work.

I guess, you know, great car design is funny, it’s one of those things where it’s almost like a bullseye. Let’s just take a ’32 Ford, kind of the iconic car, right? And if I walk up to it it’s like; “all right a ’32 Ford, is it a Coupe or a Roadster?” Moves in a little bit. “Oh it is, cool. All right, is it flathead car? Oh cool.” Moves in a little bit more and you look inside. “It’s still got three-speed, and a quick change!” It’s funny. Most cars that I see, I like them and then they’ll usually get about 85% of the way there and then there’s one or two things that will throw it off. But when you see a car that carries the right thing, the theme, the idea, the flavor that they’re going for all the way through, that’s the best thing in the world.

You’re Orange County based, but if you go to the Grand National Roadster Show there is a number of great cars there. But you go on that main show floor and you see somebody that did a car right and they chose an era, and the chose a theme and by golly they stuck with it all the way and carried it out on the car right down to the correct tires or whatever. You do it with race cars too, you build it the way Mario Andretti raced it and you would not dream of putting some funky, modern shock absorbers with piggie-back reservoirs on it because that doesn’t belong on that car. And I love it when a car is built from scratch, and Chip Foose who has worked with us on the Cars movie, he does an amazing job of carrying a theme through all the way that echoes in the interior, and it echoes in the body lines. And when it is done right, it is awesome, and it is rare that guys get it totally right.

Ray Evernham (L), and Jay Ward (R) at Pixar

AutoDesignO: Well, clearly you have passion for hot-rods and certainly a background in racing. How do you feel about some of the more modern cars that have come out, some of the modern sports cars? Do you feel like they capture some of that same passion or are they kind of going off in a different direction?

Ray Evernham: I feel that if you asked me that question five or six years ago, maybe ten years ago, I would have said maybe they had lost some of that. But when you look at the new C7 Corvette, and now the NSX, and some of the BMW designed stuff that has come out, it’s incredible again. All those things that we talked about, that combination of shapes and stance and almost old versus new. I just really think that the designers are capturing that again. You look at what Cadillac has done with the CTS-V, and to me they have captured that again but it’s only been recently, the last three, four, five years have really gotten hot in design again.

Jay Ward: Yeah it’s funny, and then there’s some designs like the Porsche 911 for a modern sports car. I have an old 911, it’s not that old but it’s old. But they managed to carry that design language through for all these years, 50 years of making a car and gently evolving it where it still has that footprint of the original car with the rear engine and the greenhouse shape, and that car works, it just still works. You’re right, some manufacturers have lost their way and got back. I think there was some of the years the Corvette were not that pretty. Some of the stuff Ferrari was making for while was not very pretty, and you have to figure out what your language is. The new Alfa Romeo Giulia, I think that is a pretty car, that’s a pretty good looking car.

Jay Ward at Fantasy Junction

AutoDesignO: Mentioning both the Corvette and the Porsche, we see those influences in the new Cars 3 movie. What other cars were you guys capturing in the movie that also fit in that sort of category of excitement?

Jay Ward: Well it depends on the character we are designing. So if you are designing a character like Jackson Storm, you went to the talk on that today, Jay Shuster, the character designer, he’s looking at a bunch of different things, a bunch of different influences. Part is from the racing world, part is totally from his mind, part of it is stuff we might get from Ray, of arrow that they’re doing on cars and saying; “what would arrow be like five or ten years form now?”

The influence has come from a bunch of different places. If we are doing a real car, like for instance the ’55 Chrysler 300. We are going to study the heck out of that car. I remember the Henry Ford Museum has a great, one of the early cars and we just went crazy photographing and studying. That’s a little easier. When you are making something from scratch you are pulling your influences from all over the place.

AutoDesignO: Cars is a billion dollar franchise already. Can you see this moving away … I mean still being something automotive, but another franchise separate from Cars, because clearly there is an audience for this type of stuff? Cars has its own direction, maybe something entirely different but automotive related?

Jay Ward: No I haven’t. I guess because there’s still so many stories that we want to tell in this world, and we do love this world so much that I think we always just go deeper in this world that we’ve opened up instead of trying to divide somebody’s interest. I think because people now have an emotional attachment to this film and these characters, they kind of want to know other chapters in these characters’ lives or meet other characters that meet the characters they love. I kind of see it as a tree that keeps growing branches, as opposed to planting the same kind of tree a block away.

AutoDesignO: You were talking about the evolution of the Porsche (911). We’ve seen an evolution in design, what do you foresee coming up in the next few years that might get integrated into other Pixar projects?

Jay Ward: That’s a really good question again. It’s funny because car design is taking some interesting turns, I am interested to see where it goes. The shapes are starting to get so smooth now because they’re trying to get the maximum fuel mileage out of them, and some of them are successful, some of them are not very memorable, that go away pretty quickly and you could put any badge on that car and really don’t care what it is. That doesn’t necessarily excite me, and I don’t know how much that will influence the Cars films. What I think we do well is we have a nice blend of old cars, new cars and in-house design cars, cars that we design from scratch.

To me the most exciting thing is in-house designed cars, because that means we can make whatever me want. If you think about Cars coming out in 2006, McQueen doesn’t look like anything that was brand new in 2006. He’s cool, and he’s a race car and he’s trick looking, but he doesn’t look like a 2006 NASCAR. We would have made him much more smoother like the twisted sister kind of car, instead we just said “No”, let’s just make him who we want him to be and I’m glad we did that. He is timeless that way.

AutoDesignO: As we see a lot of things develop technology wise, would it be kind of cool to have a virtual reality Cars movie?

Jay Ward: I don’t know. VR is a different format. It’s a tool, VR is a tool. So just like animation is a way that we tell our stories. People used to do 2D animation, and we do 3D animation, and VR is something different. The different thing with VR that is challenging for me is in VR I can turn my head and look and go wherever I want to go. But we’re showing a traditional film, I’m setting everything up in place and you’re seeing what I want you to see because I’m telling you a story. So if I’m trying to show you this story and you got VR goggles, you are like; “that’s great but I’m going to go look over here”, and it’s hard to keep you on the story I’m trying to tell you. That’s my personal thing with VR that is still a bit of a head scratcher to me, how to really make that work. I think there’s going to be some very interesting VR projects coming in the next few years, I can definitely see that from personal experience, but I don’t know.

AutoDesignO: You are both very passionate about automotive, what kind of cars do you own?

Ray Evernham: How much time do we have left?

Jay Ward: He’s got a Jeep Sahara 4-door.

Ray Evernham: That’s what I drive. Everyday I drive a Jeep Sahara 4-door.

Jay Ward: Is that your daily ride on 35s with a winch?

Ray Evernham: It’s got 35s on it. But … I have about 100 cars.

AutoDesignO: And maybe you want to narrow it down to a few of your favorites?

Ray Evernham: I drive a 1958 Chevrolet Impala, a real 348 three deuces car. I have a 1965 Malibu SS, that we resto-modded with Detroit speed suspension and aluminum 427 in it. The car that you saw today, the Junior Midnight Moon, I actually drive that car.

Jay Ward: He’s going to give that car to me.

Ray Evernham: I’m going to give it to you to use a little while. So, but those are the cars I drive the most of, and I actually just purchased, finished a purchase out here of a 1947 Hudson pickup that we are going to put some new running gear in and drive. It’s a little bit different color than Smokey but it looks a lot like that. Where his is orange and kind of rusty, mine is a light blue and kind of rusty.

Jay Ward: This is actually a very interesting story about this Hudson pickup, and I’m going to jump in because this is something we discovered together. We did a press thing up at Sonoma Raceway, we’re doing the presentation and somebody asked us, “what’s the next old car you would like to own?” You always think about what your next car is, you got this cool car but you’re always thinking about your next buy. And you actually said to me: “you know what? I kind of like the Hudson pickup, it would be cool to find one of those.” You do kind of forget about Hudson pickups, they stopped making them in ’47, you forget about them right? It’s not as popular as a Ford or a Chevy. And literally, we drove away from the Sonoma Raceway and Ray goes: “You’ll never guess where I’m going right now.”

I said, “Where?”

“I’m going to this guy’s place, this chicken coup, he’s got a Hudson pickup truck in it.”

And he bought a Hud… Literally after we just got through doing press-

Ray Evernham: It was crazy. It was crazy. I went to see a guy about a race car and he had Hudson pickup parts, and I was like: “Man, those things are hard to find. Because at lunch we looked into them and there were hardly none on the internet. They’re hard to find right.”

And he said, “Oh I’ve got four of them.”

I was like: “What? You want to sell any of them?”

He said, “Yeah I might sell some.”

I said, “Well where are they?”

He said, “20 minutes from here in a chicken coup.”

So I called him and said: “You’re not going to believe this”. And sure enough…

Jay Ward: And I knew where he was going. As soon as he said “chicken coup”, I said, “you are going to Petaluma”, because that is a chicken town.

Ray Evernham: And that’s where it was.

AutoDesignO: It was meant to be.

Jay Ward: It was meant to be. Isn’t that crazy?

AutoDesignO: So what about your, you know?

Jay Ward: Daily drive, I have a little Mercedes hatchback called a GLA45, and that’s 375 horsepower out of a little four-cylinder. That car is a little rocket. And what I like about it is it doesn’t look like much, but it’s really quick and it does really good in traffic, and it’s a funny little driver. And it’s just something right now, I don’t know if I’ll keep it forever, but it’s fun.

For old cars, I’ve got a ’57 Pontiac Safari Wagon, which is like a nomad. I take my kids to school in that. I got a ’39 Merc convertible, which is the first year Merc did a convertible, which is a special car. That’s kind of a Westergard pre-war style custom. I got a ’29 Model-A Roadster that I built with my wife when I got married. It’s got a Cadillac 331 in it, ’55 Cadi engine drive train in it I built. And then I’ve got a ’76 911s which I didn’t expect to get, I got it from my neighbor because it was a special car and I helped her work on it, so I bought it from her.

AutoDesignO: Nice selection.

Jay Ward: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting.

AutoDesignO: Kind of broad.

Jay Ward: Some good stuff. Yeah.

AutoDesignO: It’s kind of like one car for every mood you are in.

Jay Ward: Yeah it is, it is. And if I lived in North Carolina like Ray, and I had a little bit more space, and a little bit more free time and money, I would be dangerous. I would be like you (looking at Ray), I would have a hundred cars in no time.

Ray Evernham: Just the problem. Cars are like crack to me.

Jay Ward: It’s like chips. You can’t just eat one. You can’t stop at one.

Ray Evernham: There’s no way in the world I have enough time on this earth to finish all the projects that I want.

Jay Ward: No, and the thing is, even when you’ve got amazing cars you are always like: “Man … A ’39 Zephyr 3 window coupe, look at the lines on that thing. I want one of those.” And you’re searching.

AutoDesignO: I think that means you just have to live forever then to get those projects completed?

Ray Evernham: I’ll keep working on it, but I do just love cars. That’s why when you asked about the design, I don’t go to a car show or even when we walk over to Fantasy Junction there, those cars really aren’t my thing. But I love that handcrafted design, and I used to go up to GM to visit Ed Welburn a lot, and I used to love to just sit and talk to Ed about cars and he would show. Just that personalization of being able to … When I look at a car I almost think of … When I see a car it’s like I see wind, right, and then music together. If that makes sense?

You know, I love the old art-deco cars, but when you look at the big swoopy fenders, and the big skirts, you know the wind is moving slow and smooth and you can almost hear like a classical movie thing. And you look at Jackson Storm and Jay and I talked about this; engines lower, center of cars lower, but the fenders are taller because the car’s getting lower so it would get pointed now. They’re not just letting the air go over. They’re making the air work, and it’s like, all of a sudden your heart starts beating a little bit faster, and you hear that “duhduhduhduhduh”, and it’s still great design but two totally different heart beats when you see it. I can’t sit here and say, maybe I might say I’ve seen some, there’s been some ugly cars, but very few.

AutoDesignO: So years ago would you ever have thought somebody would have asked you to be a consultant on an animated movie about cars?

Ray Evernham: No. This has been the time of my life, honestly. And obviously my career is into retirement, but this is something I will look back at as one of the jewels of my career for my children’s sake.